limitation of nature; for the cases in which the judgment of a girl of eighteen is better than that of her parents are very few.  Besides, the inevitable “heart-disease” was a specter that guarded the gates of Julia’s prison.  Night after night she sat looking out over the hills sleeping in hazy darkness, toward the hollow in which stood the castle; night after night she had half-formed the purpose of visiting August, and then the life-long habit of obedience and a certain sense of delicacy held her back.  But on this night, after the consultation, she felt that she would see him if her seeing him brought down the heavens.

It was a very dark night.  She sat waiting for hours—­very long hours they seemed to her—­and then, at midnight, she began to get ready to start.

Only those who have taken such a step can understand the pain of deciding, the agony of misgivings in the execution, the trembling that Julia felt when she turned the brass knob on the front door and lifted the latch—­lifted the latch slowly and cautiously, for it was near the door of her mother’s room—­and then crept out like a guilty thing into the dark dampness of the night, groping her way to the gate, and stumbling along down the road.  It had been raining, and there was not one star-twinkle in the sky; the only light was that of glow-worms illuminating here and there two or three blades of grass by feeble shining.  Now and then a fire-fly made a spot of light in the blackness, only to leave a deeper spot of blackness when he shut off his intermittent ray.  And when at last Julia found herself at the place where the path entered the woods, the blackness ahead seemed still more frightful.  She had to grope, recognizing every deviation from the well-beaten path by the rustle of the dead leaves which lay, even in summer, half a foot deep upon the ground.  The “fox-fire,” rotting logs glowing with a faint luminosity, startled her several times, and the hooting-owl’s shuddering bass—­hoo! hoo! hoo-oo-ah-h! (like the awful keys of the organ which “touch the spinal cord of the universe")—­sent all her blood to her heart.  Under ordinary circumstances, she surely would not have started at the rustling made by the timid hare in the thicket near by.  There was no reason why she should shiver so when a misstep caused her to scratch her face with the thorny twigs of a wild plum-tree.  But the effort necessary to the undertaking and the agony of the long waiting had exhausted her nervous force, and she had none left for fortitude.  So that when she arrived at Andrew’s fence and felt her way along to the gate, and heard the hoarse, thunderous baying of his great St. Bernard dog, she was ready to faint.  But a true instinct makes such a dog gallant.  It is a vile cur that will harm a lady.  Julia walked trembling up to the front-door of the castle, growled at by the huge black beast, and when the Philosopher admitted her, some time after she had knocked, she sank down fainting into a chair.